throttle two others--smell and taste. Obviously
the only way of smelling anything is to sniff its odor into your nose.
And if this be more or less, or completely, blocked up, and its delicate
mucous membranes coated with a thick, ropy discharge, you will not be
able to distinguish anything but the crudest and rankest of odors. But
what has this to do with taste? Merely that two-thirds of what we term
"taste" is really smell. Seal the nostrils and you can't "tell chalk
from cheese," not even a cube of apple from a cube of onion, as scores
of experiments have shown. We all know how flat tea, coffee, and even
our own favorite dishes taste when we have a bad cold, and this,
remember, is the permanent condition of the palate of the poor little
mouth-breather. No wonder his appetite is apt to be poor, and that even
what food he eats will not produce a flow of "appetite juice" in the
stomach, which Pavloff has shown to be so necessary to digestion. No
wonder his digestion is apt to go wrong, ably assisted by the continual
drip of the chronic discharge down the back of his throat; his bowels to
become clogged and his abdomen distended.

But the resources for mischief of this pharyngeal "Old Man of the Sea"
are not even yet exhausted. Next comes a very curious and unexpected
one. We have all heard much of "the struggle for existence" among plants
and animals, and have had painful demonstrations of its reality in our
own personal experience. But we hardly suspected that it was going on in
our own interior. Such, however, is the case; and when once one organ or
structure falls behind the others in the race of growth, its neighbors
promptly begin to encroach upon and take advantage of it. Emerson was
right when he said, "I am the Cosmos," the universe.

Now, the mouth and the nose were originally one cavity. As Huxley long
ago remarked, "When Nature undertook to build the skull of a land animal
she was too lazy to start on new lines, and simply took the old
fish-skull and made it over, for air-breathing purposes." And a clumsy
job she made of it!

It may be remarked, in passing, that mouth-breathing, as a matter of
history, is an exceedingly old and respectable habit, a reversion, in
fact, to the method of breathing of the fish and the frog. "To drink
like a fish" is a shameful and utterly unfounded aspersion upon a
blameless creature of most correct habits and model deportment. What the
poor goldfish in the bowl is really doing